Beauty alters the grain of reality.

I love the tradition of Dickens, where even the most minor walk-on characters are twitching and particular and alive.

It is is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.

The trouble is when people read about authors, they don't feel compelled to read the authors' work.

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

You are - all your experience just kind of accumulates, and the novel takes a richness of its own simply because it has the weight of all those years that one's put into it.

If he had his wits about him Bunny would surely keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.